Gianni Toniolo was not only a great historian, one of the most appreciated internationally, but he was also a man of rare sensitivity and courtesy. This is why we all loved him and that today we feel lost because we feel we have lost an important reference in our life, not just professional.
His training as a historian was rigorous and he immediately turned to economic facts, because he was interested above all in society, in the institutions that form it, in the social problems that characterize it. In his research, even those dedicated to apparently minute topics, he always offered us a comprehensive vision of an institution, of a story. A skill that only great historians have and that was the great lesson of the Annales school, which also produced in Italy studies that are as important in results as they are original in method.
His professional experience has been closely intertwined with the Bank of Italy, since his youthful friendship with Pierluigi Ciocca, which was then consolidated due to the attention that our central bank has given to the reconstruction of the history of Italy and of the institution. First with the monumental work published on the occasion of the centenary and now with the volumes dedicated specifically to the Bank of Italy, the first of which Toniolo had recently completed, dedicated to the years from 1893 to 1943. It is much more than the history of an institution: it is a fascinating fresco of Italian society and politics in a half century in which Italy has become an industrial power, fought a bloody war and suffered a dictatorship that led it to a new war.
The charm of the book is to use the point of view of the central bank (for most of the time dominated by the charismatic figure of Bonaldo Stringher) to analyze the society of the time and its main actors. An extraordinary work was born because, precisely because of the breadth of the analysis, it is one of the indispensable works to understand not only what central banks are and how they were born, not only to place the evolution of the Bank of Italy in the wake of evolution of the theories of central banking, but also to understand the history of Italy of that fifty years and the problems of its society and its politics.
The fact is that Toniolo has always paid great attention to society and to the imbalances and inequalities that have been accentuating in recent decades. Not surprisingly, he had studied in depth the Beveridge report, one of the cornerstones of the modern welfare state, written when Great Britain was still at war, which marked the reforms not only in that country, but throughout Europe, including Italy.